Presently, healthcare enterprises generally are plagued by the lack of connectivity and interoperability between disparate hospital information systems (HIS) and radiology information systems (RIS) from a variety of vendors. Typical systems may employ a mix of incompatible formats for patient textual records and diagnostic images, such as HL7, DICOM, TIFF, JPEG, IHE, and XML.
The lack of interoperability between existing information and imaging systems is one of the most critical problems facing the diagnostic and management effectiveness of the healthcare profession today. This fundamental problem not only diminishes the potential benefits of medical care capability, it also diminishes the financial bottom line of every healthcare facility. In addition, solving the interoperability problem is essential for eventual implementation of a standard-based enterprise-wide Electronic Health Record.
One of the major goals of the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) is to have the multiple HIS, RIS, PACS, and proprietary systems appear to be a single working virtual entity implemented on one enterprise network. An augmented, interoperative, integrated network provides a basis for achieving this goal of seamless enterprise integration. This is especially true in managing and automatically routing the enterprise workflow in the analysis of diagnostic images.
Typical problems involved in managing workflow of diagnostic images in a healthcare enterprise involve having an imaging specialist or diagnostic physician at the right place and at the right time to analyze diagnostic images. All too often imaging specialists must physically travel from one facility to another, wasting valuable time and increasing overall costs. Even when an enterprise is networked, but not automated, an imaging specialist or diagnostic physician must log on to several HIS/RIS/PACS systems and often manually seek out the needed patient data. In addition, a specialist, such as a neuro-radiologist, at one facility may need to diagnose and report on patients from other facilities. Information for such diagnostic work may require input from several facilities and several HIS/RIS/PACS systems.
Naturally, the incompatibilities of multiple HIS/RIS/PACS systems preclude automatically acquiring, compiling, parsing, routing, sorting, and displaying a network-wide composite list of diagnostic studies to be performed—known as a “worklist”. The incompatibilities preclude automatically accessing all relevant diagnostic images, history, reports, and patient records, which are required to process the entries in the worklist at a single workstation. Further, relevant diagnostic images, history, reports, and patient records may exist in diverse formats and reside on diverse network file servers, imaging systems, workstations, and archives. Thus, there is a need for a healthcare enterprise worklist that is custom filtered for a specific healthcare diagnostician. Using this worklist, the diagnostician can log onto a single network workstation at one location with access to all the images, records, and archive reports for each subject of a worklist entry.